Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances (speech) or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.

Transcription should not be confused with translation, which means representing the meaning of a source language text in a target language (e.g. translating the meaning of an English text into Spanish), or with transliteration which means representing a text from one script in another (e.g. transliterating a Cyrillic text into the Latin script).

In the academic discipline of linguistics, transcription is an essential part of the methodologies of (among others) phonetics, conversation analysis, dialectology and sociolinguistics. It also plays an important role for several subfields of speech technology. Common examples for transcriptions outside academia are the proceedings of a court hearing such as a criminal trial (by a court reporter) or a physician's recorded voice notes (medical transcription). This article focuses on transcription in linguistics.

Phonetic vs. orthographic transcription[link]

Broadly speaking, there are two possible approaches to linguistic transcription. Phonetic transcription focuses on phonetic and phonological properties of spoken language. Systems for phonetic transcription thus furnish rules for mapping individual sounds or phonemes to written symbols. Systems for orthographic transcription, by contrast, consist of rules for mapping spoken words onto written forms as prescribed by the orthography of a given language. Phonetic transcription operates with specially defined character sets, usually the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Which type of transcription is chosen depends mostly on the research interests pursued. Since phonetic transcription strictly foregrounds the phonetic nature of language, it is most useful for phonetic or phonological analyses. Orthographic transcription, on the other hand, has a morphological and a lexical component alongside the phonetic component (which aspect is represented to which degree depends on the language and orthography in question). It is thus more convenient wherever meaning-related aspects of spoken language are investigated. Phonetic transcription is doubtlessly more systematic in a scientific sense, but it is also harder to learn, more time-consuming to carry out and less widely applicable than orthographic transcription.

Transcription as theory[link]

Mapping spoken language onto written symbols is not as straightforward a process as may seem at first glance. Written language is an idealisation, made up of a limited set of clearly distinct and discrete symbols. Spoken language, on the other hand, is a continuous (as opposed to discrete) phenomenon, made up of a potentially unlimited number of components. There is no predetermined system for distinguishing and classifying these components and, consequently, no preset way of mapping these components onto written symbols.

Transcription systems[link]

Transcription systems are sets of rules which define how spoken language is to represented in written symbols. Most phonetic transcription systems are based on the International Phonetic Alphabet or, especially in speech technology, on its derivative SAMPA. Examples for orthographic transcription systems (all from the field of conversation analysis or related fields) are:

CA (Conversation Analysis)

Arguably the first system of its kind, originally sketched in (Sacks et al. 1978), later adapted for the use in computer readable corpora as CA-CHAT by (MacWhinney 2000)

DT (Discourse Transcription)

A system described in (DuBois et al. 1992), used for transcription of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE), later developed further into DT2

GAT (Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem – Conversation Analytic transcription system)

A system described in (Selting et al. 1998), later developed further into GAT2 (Selting et al. 2009), widely used in German speaking countries for prosodically oriented conversation analysis and interactional linguistics

HIAT (Halbinterpretative Arbeitstranskriptionen – Semiinterpretative Working Transcriptions)

A system originally described in (Ehlich and Rehbein 1976) – see (Ehlich 1992) for an English reference - adapted for the use in computer readable corpora as (Rehbein et al. 2004), and widely used in functional pragmatics.

Transcription software[link]

Transcription was originally a process carried out manually, i.e. with pencil and paper, using an analogue sound recording stored on, e.g., a Compact Cassette. Nowadays, most transcription is done on computers. Recordings are usually digital audio or video files, and transcriptions are electronic documents. Specialized computer software exists to assist the transcriber in efficiently creating a digital transcription from a digital recording. Among the most widely used transcription tools in linguistic research are:

ANVIL (Annotation of Video and Language Data)

A tool specialising in transcription of multimodal interaction, see ANVIL-Website

CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis)

A tool mainly used for the transcription of child language acquisition data as in the CHILDES database, see CLAN page of the CHILDES website

ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator)

A tool widely used for the transcription of sign language and the documentation of endangered languages, see ELAN page on the Language Archiving Technology portal

EXMARaLDA (Extensible Markup Language for Discourse Annotation)

A tool widely used in discourse analysis, dialectology and sociolinguistics, see EXMARaLDA website

FOLKER (FOLK Editor)

A tool developed for the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK) and widely used in conversation analysis, see FOLKER page at the website of the Institute for German Language

Praat

A tool widely used in phonetic, see PRAAT website

Transcriber

A tool originally developed for the transcription of speech, see Transcriber website at SourceForge

Other transcription software is developed for commercial sale.

See also[link]

• Phonetic transcription
• Speech recognition
• Subtitle (captioning)
• Transcription (service)
• Transcription (software)
• Interlinear gloss

External links[link]

• Transcription in Action - website from UC Santa Barbara
• Documentation and examples for the HIAT transcription system
• Transcription - a website with resources for transcription in conversation analysis
• Turn your text into fənɛ́tɪks (IPA / American)

References[link]

• DuBois, John / Schuetze-Coburn, Stephan / Cumming, Susanne / Paolino, Danae (1992): Outline of Discourse Transcription. In: Edwards/Lampert (1992), 45-89.
• Ehlich, K. (1992). HIAT - a Transcription System for Discourse Data. In: Edwards, Jane / Lampert, Martin (eds.): Talking Data – Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 123-148.
• Ehlich, K. & Rehbein, J. (1976) Halbinterpretative Arbeitstranskriptionen (HIAT). In: Linguistische Berichte (45), 21-41.
• Jenks, C.J. (2011) Transcribing Talk and Interaction: Issues in the Representation of Communication Data. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• MacWhinney, Brian (2000): The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Rehbein, J.; Schmidt, T.; Meyer, B.; Watzke, F. & Herkenrath, A. (2004) Handbuch für das computergestützte Transkribieren nach HIAT. In: Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit, Folge B (56). Online version
• Ochs, E. (1979) Transcription as theory. In: Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. B. (ed.): Developmental pragmatics, 43-72. New York: Academic Press.
• Sacks, H.; Schegloff, E. & Jefferson, G. (1978) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation. In: Schenkein, J. (ed.): Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, 7-56. New York: Academic Press.
• Selting, Margret / Auer, Peter / Barden, Birgit / Bergmann, Jörg / Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth / Günthner, Susanne / Meier, Christoph / Quasthoff, Uta / Schlobinski, Peter / Uhmann, Susanne (1998): Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem (GAT). In: Linguistische Berichte 173, 91-122.
• Selting, M., Auer, P., Barth-Weingarten, D., Bergmann, J., Bergmann, P., Birkner, K., Couper-Kuhlen, E., Deppermann, A., Gilles, P., Günthner, S., Hartung, M., Kern, F., Mertzlufft, C., Meyer, C., Morek, M., Oberzaucher, F., Peters, J., Quasthoff, U., Schütte, W., Stukenbrock, A., Uhmann, S. (2009): Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT 2). In: Gesprächsforschung (10), 353-402. Online version

Steven Arthur Pinker
Steven Pinker in 2011
Born	(1954-09-18) September 18, 1954 (age 57) Montréal, Québec, Canada
Residence	United States of America
Citizenship	Canadian
Fields	Evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, visual cognition
Alma mater	Dawson College, McGill University, Harvard University
Known for	How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate
Influences	Noam Chomsky, Thomas Sowell, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Schelling[1]
Notable awards	Troland Award (2003, National Academy of Sciences), Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution), Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA), George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society)
Website
http://www.stevenpinker.com/

Steven Pinker in Göttingen in 2010

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,^[2] and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

Biography[link]

Career[link]

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. He graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a BA degree in psychology at McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his PhD degree in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995-96. As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.^[3] In June 2011 it was announced he would give lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.^[4]

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004^[5] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005^[6] and 2008;^[7] in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.^[8][9] His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003.

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers's remarks, properly understood, could form the basis of a testable hypothesis. The remarks, Pinker said, claimed not that men are consistently smarter, but that there are "more idiots, [and] more geniuses" of the male gender.^[10]

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.^[11]

In 2009, Pinker wrote a highly critical review of Malcolm Gladwell's analytic methods in the New York Times.^[12] Gladwell published a rebuttal in the Times regarding Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Pinker then responded to Gladwell's rebuttal.^[13] The exchange prompted Advanced NFL Stats to step in and address the issue statistically, siding with Pinker in that draft order is indeed correlated with quarterback performance.^[14]

Pinker also serves on the Advisory Board of Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to Executive Director Sean Faircloth and the entire coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. ^[15]

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry lists Pinker as one of their fellows. ^[16]

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.^[17] Pinker appeared on the Colbert Report on 10/18/11.

Personal[link]

His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.^[18][19] Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.^[20] His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.^[21] He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."^[22] As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969.^[23] He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian".^[24] Pinker confesses to having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.^[25]

Theories of language and mind[link]

Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In The Language Instinct (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

Written work[link]

Pinker's books, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. The Language Instinct has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, The 'Language Instinct' Debate.^[26] The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling), which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.

Bibliography[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker in 2005

Books[link]

• Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) ISBN 978-0-674-51055-5
• Visual Cognition (1985) ISBN 978-0-262-66178-2
• Connections and Symbols (1988) ISBN 978-0-262-66064-8
• Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989) ISBN 978-0-262-66073-0
• Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992) ISBN 978-1-55786-354-6
• The Language Instinct (1994) ISBN 978-0-06-097651-4
• How the Mind Works (1997) ISBN 978-0-393-31848-7
• Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999) ISBN 978-0-465-07269-9
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002) ISBN 978-0-670-03151-1
• The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004) ISBN 978-0-618-24698-4
• Hotheads (an extract from How the Mind Works, 2005) ISBN 978-0-14-102238-3
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007) ISBN 978-0-670-06327-7
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3

Articles and essays[link]

• Pinker, S. (1991). "Rules of Language". Science 253 (5019): 530–535. DOI:10.1126/science.1857983. 
• Ullman, M.; Corkin, S.; Coppola, M.; Hickok, G.; Growdon, J. H.; Koroshetz, W. J.; Pinker, S. (1997). "A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9: 289–299. 
• Pinker, S. (2003) "Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche" In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution: States of the Art New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pinker, S. (2005). "So How Does the Mind Work?". Mind and Language 20 (1): 1–24. DOI:10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00274.x. 
• Jackendoff, R.; Pinker, S. (2005). "The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language" (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky)". Cognition 97 (2): 211–225. DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.04.006. 
• S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" Chicago Sun-Times, July 15, 2007
• A number of Pinker's articles at Harvard

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Steven Pinker

• Official website

Interviews

• In Depth interview with Pinker, November 2, 2008
• Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"
• Steven Pinker on The Hour
• Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files
• Biology vs. the Blank Slate Reason magazine interview with Pinker
• Live interview with Steven Pinker on The Blank Slate
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Online video interview with Pinker

TED talks

• Chalking it up to the blank slate, 2003
• The stuff of thought, 2005
• A brief history of violence, 2007

Debates

• The Two Steves Debate with Steven Rose
• The Science of Gender and Science Debate with Elizabeth Spelke